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points by ruslan 2 days ago | 0 comments

> but because there's no way in C to force API users to decide what to do if an error occurrs,

0. There are tons of libc functions that return NULL on failure, it is conventional way in C to indicate failure.

1. There's no much to decide, just fail to login if crypt() fails with NULL.

2. errno is standard way in C to check error code of a failing function, but in case of login you hardly need this, just fail!

I totally agree that fixing this issue in musl was a pretty dubious solution. Don't fix what's not broken, fix broken application instead. Publish a CVE if you cannot fix it.

I looked through FreeBSD source code for how they use crypt(), it's checked for NULL everywhere!

UPD: Except libpam. :(

[–] __david__ 2 days ago

Nothing you said is incorrect, but I believe they meant that there’s no way to force a C program to check the NULL correctly—the compiler will happily compile code that gets a pointer back from a function but doesn’t check for NULL before dereferencing it. In something like Rust the type system won’t let you touch the value until you’ve done something to deal with the error. Even if you just want to ignore it, you are forced to acknowledge that the function is fallible by the type system—it’s a compile error if you don’t.